


Beast

by soulshrapnel



Category: Original Work
Genre: (not intended as dubcon but can be read that way), F/F, Frottage, Meeting in dreams, Sex Magic, guided masturbation, i said slay the monster not lay the monster, magical enchantment i guess, neurodivergent character, singing voice kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:55:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26009137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulshrapnel/pseuds/soulshrapnel
Summary: Linia is an adventurer who's never failed a mission. But when she's hired to fight the beast that lives in a ruined temple, she quickly realizes she doesn't want to fight. There's something beautiful about this beast, her mystical power, her voice - and the way that she might just need someone like Linia to help her.
Relationships: Adventurer/Mythological Creature
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9
Collections: Femslash After Dark 2020





	Beast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [2Nienna2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/2Nienna2/gifts).



> I want to say thank you for 2Nienna2 for your lovely, detailed prompt letter with a list of so many things you like - it was super easy to find things on that list that excited me and gave me ideas and it's really made me want to up my own game in terms of the prompts I give people (which are often quite vague). I hope what I came up with is to your liking!

Linia crept through the undergrowth towards the ancient temple, her sword strapped heavily to her back, twigs and leaves tickling at her arms.

It loomed up in front of her, a pyramidal stone shape overgrown with ivy and clinging vines. Runes in a long-forgotten language covered its outside, half-obscured by lichen. The forest had long since grown back into place around it, and thick-trunked trees grew even at the temple's very edge, their broad leaves giving shade, their roots creeping up the crumbling stone like tentacles. And the remnants of something larger were still here, fragments of stone slabs half-intact in the soil between the trees, on which maybe people or horses had once walked up and down.

Linia wasn't here to work out what this place might once have looked like, what might once have been done there. She was a mercenary, and she had her instructions. Enter the temple. Take the treasure. Slay the beast.

*

"What beast?" Linia had said, when she first took the job.

"The beast that lives there, of course," her prospective employer had said, impatiently. Lady Amelia was the leader of the village nearest this temple, and she'd invited Linia into her own halls to discuss the job. Soft silk hangings, clean wooden walls. A tapestry of the Four Gods hung directly above her chair, dwarfing both women. Lady Amelia's light brown hair was immaculate, and she wore jewels, and she looked as though she did not easily suffer fools. She could pay, though, which was the important thing. "The one that's been stealing our livestock. The one that's been bewitching village girls in their dreams and causing madness and ruin. You know. That beast."

Linia was used to nobles like Amelia talking down to her. Linia was used to being out of place, even by the standards of adventurers. Her fingers moved as she talked, tugging at the tangles of her long black hair, in a gesture people like Lady Amelia too often took for nervousness or distraction. Really Linia just didn't like to sit still. "I was hoping you could describe what it looked like. Or has nobody ever seen this beast?"

Lady Amelia waved a dismissive hand. "Only in snatches. Great size. Green scales. No one's seen more than that and lived to tell the tale. Of course, if you don't consider yourself up to the task, I can seek out another champion."

"I can do it," said Linia. She'd never yet failed at a mission. "For the advertised reward, of course. Half on acceptance and half on delivery."

Lady Amelia's lip curled. Nobles didn't like to talk about base things like money in such blunt terms. Linia didn't know any other way to talk about them, and she'd been cheated out of payment before. Lady Amelia could deal with it.

"Of course," she said. "My treasurer will handle the payment. See that it's done."

*

The stone was rough under Linia's hands as she crept cautiously in.

There was a wide front door to the temple, long-sealed, grown over with vines. Whatever lived in here, it wouldn't enter and leave through those big, unused doors. It would have its own route. A bit of creeping around the temple's edge had revealed a likely candidate, a side entrance that was little more than a crack in the wall. A darkened opening where some foul, wild creature might have slithered inside.

Linia could fit into that opening, so long as she crawled, ducking so her sword didn't scrape against the uneven walls.

At the end of that narrow passage the way opened out into a room. Linia could see it in front of her as she crept forward. It should have been pitch-black, but the monster that lived inside must have found some way of lighting its surroundings - maybe fire, maybe glowmoss, maybe magic of some kind. There was a dim, flickering, pale light, and it illuminated a stone room large enough for a gathering of a dozen people, set with runes and carvings that she couldn't make out from here.

Something was moving inside.

Linia dragged herself another inch forward, very carefully. Any sound could alert the beast to her presence.

In the corner of her field of view, she thought she saw a creature moving past the edge of the passage. She froze. She couldn't see its shape, only the edge of it, something rippling with emerald-green scales in the dim light.

And then it began to sing.

It was the most beautiful voice Linia had ever heard. Ethereal and powerful, wordless and wide in its range, full of emotion and yet unselfconscious, as if the beast did not know there was a woman with a sword creeping through its door even now - _her_ door, Linia could not help thinking; the voice was unmistakably a woman's. As if she were only singing to herself to pass the time.

Linia had heard of this before, of course. Some monsters used their voices, singing or otherwise, to bewitch people. Linia was a stalwart mercenary, here for a job, and the beast was hurting townsfolk. She should resist this.

And yet.

She wanted to come in. Wasn't that her job? She was supposed to force her way in here and confront the beast. But the thought of doing that, _seeing_ the creature who made this sound, suddenly made her feel warm all over - imagining what those green scales would feel like under her fingertips. Against her tongue.

This was crazy. Linia didn't even know if the beast had human features, or a mind.

She dug her fingers painfully into the rock.

The next thing she knew, she was fleeing.

*

"You didn't get the beast," Lady Amelia said, frowning elegantly.

Linia curled her fingers more tightly in her hair. She'd never run away from a mission like this before. "This was just a first attempt. Scoping out the territory. Sometimes it's like this, you know. Even the best adventurers can't solve every problem in an instant. Sometimes one needs a few attempts."

Linia had never needed more than one attempt to slay a monster before. But Lady Amelia didn't need to know that.

Lady Amelia wrinkled her nose, bored and superior. "Attempt again, then. But you'll receive no more payment until you've finished the job."

*

Linia went to bed that night haunted. She'd rented a room at the local inn - the cheap kind that people like her, transient and always up to trouble, could afford. Private, even though that cost extra. Some adventurers liked to carouse. Linia needed her quiet time.

She tossed and turned on her straw mattress. She didn't know how she was going to do this. She didn't even remember making the decision to flee. One moment, she had been in the temple, carefully holding herself still, entranced and fascinated. The next, she'd been running.

And in her dreams that night, when she did sleep, she heard the beast's voice again.

It was so beautiful she wanted to cry.

"What are you?" Linia demanded. This beast's voice had to be the key to her power. It had to be how she was bewitching village girls. Causing madness and ruin.

Linia had forgotten to ask what kind of madness. What kind of bewitching.

The dream shifted, as dreams did. She had been in the dark, in something like her room at the inn, hearing that voice in the distance. Now the beast herself was suddenly around her. It was still so dark that Linia could barely see her shape. There was something like a woman's face, a woman's arms, with long hair tumbling down. And below it, endless coiling, endless green.

Linia was wrapped up in those coils like prey, but she wasn't afraid. There was no pain. Just the light caress of scales, curling around her, and the strange warmth that bloomed inside her when she realized the beast was gazing directly into her eyes.

She had not expected the scales to be warm to the touch. She had not expected them to be smooth and yielding.

"Please," she whispered, not even certain what she was begging for.

The beast leaned in, her face inches from Linia's. Her hair fell down, shrouding the two of them. Her eyes were a brilliant green, with vertical slits for pupils. She smelled like incense and honey.

"What makes you think you can ask me?" the beast asked at last. Her speaking voice was nearly as sweet as her song. "For answers - or for anything?"

"I was sent," said Linia. It was hard to think, or even to draw breath to speak.

"Sent to oppose me," the beast said, unruffled. "Sent to take what is mine. But that isn't what you truly want, is it?"

Somehow an echo of music still floated in the air. Linia didn't know how to answer. She couldn't take her eyes from the beast's mouth: such a soft, human mouth, dull pink against white teeth. But how could a human mouth make these sounds?

"There are things I can give you," the beast whispered, leaning closer. "But only when _I_ choose. Are you mine?"

Linia's lips parted; she could feel the beast's gentle breath. She wanted the beast's lips brushing hers, and it horrified her that she wanted it. But this was a dream. She tilted her head up receptively, hardly daring to do it.

And then woke up, heart pounding, on her lonely bed of straw.

*

_Are you mine?_ Of course she wasn't. Linia didn't give herself to beasts, and she'd never even met this beast before. She'd never met this beast at all, since it was only a dream.

It couldn't have been anything but a dream.

She wondered why she wasn't convinced of that.

When she was little, before Linia's parents had given up on trying to civilize her entirely, they'd scrubbed her and taken her to church each morning. They'd combed the tangles out of her unruly hair, making her cry with each tug against her scalp. They'd stuffed her into a harsh, scratchy dress and pinching shoes. She'd sat unwillingly like that throughout each service, trying to focus on the lessons at hand. The Four Gods and the four elements, neatly partitioning everything in nature into categories. Civilization and order. Everything in its place.

But Linia had wanted to be wild.

It was why she'd run away, when she was older, learning to wield a sword and survive outdoors, and to find the people like Lady Amelia who'd give her money to use those skills. The blood of monsters running down her hands, the scratch of shrubs and twigs against her limbs, these things were hard on her erratic senses, but they weren't as hard to bear as that comb and that dress and those pinching shoes, and they felt _right._ They felt like a part of the world that was made for her.

The beast felt that way, wild and uncontained and _needed,_ and Linia did not know why.

*

She needed more information.

"My lady," she said, bowing politely to Lady Amelia, who wrinkled her nose. "I want to understand this problem better so as to approach it more carefully. When you say the beast is bewitching village girls in their dreams, causing madness and ruin - what kind of madness do you mean? What are its symptoms?"

Lady Amelia waved a hand dismissively. She had wanted Linia to succeed on a first try, and now she was bored with her already. "Sexual manias, religious heresies, delusions. That sort of thing."

"Only girls? No boys, or older people?"

"Girls and a few older women, but no men that I'm aware of."

"Do the religious heresies have anything to do with whatever people used to practice in that temple?"

"How should I know? No one in living memory has been inside the temple and deciphered what religion it belongs to. Not that it would matter anyway, since any such ancient religion would be a false one."

Linia frowned. The tapestry of the Four Gods stared down at her, all of them stern and disapproving. "Could I speak to one of the girls?"

"If you must. A servant will show you the way." Lady Amelia dismissed Linia with another wave of her hand, clearly wanting the disheveled adventurer to stop wasting her time.

*

"I don't know if she'll speak to you," the matron of the house said apologetically. It was a craftsman's house, better-to-do than most of the farmers, but small compared to Lady Amelia's estate. The floors were polished wood and the windows were airy. "She's not the most lucid."

"That's fine," said Linia, trying not to look down at her feet. She had wiped them on the mat when she entered, but she still had an irrational fear of tracking dirt on these people's clean floor. "I'm just looking for information about the madness's effects. I can do that whether she speaks to me or not. Thank you for indulging me."

The matron shrugged morosely and opened the door.

The inner room was small, a maiden's room, untidy but without the stink of the sickrooms Linia was accustomed to. There was no blood, no reek of human wounds and waste. The young woman in question lay on her back, stick-thin, smiling slightly and humming to herself. She did not react to the door opening, or to her mother and a stranger entering the room. She seemed lost in some private reverie.

The girl's voice was that of a normal human girl, thin and weak and off-key, but Linia was sure that she recognized that tune.

The matron turned away. Linia tiptoed into the room and knelt by the bed. "Hello," she said.

The girl turned to look at her, but her eyes were unfocused.

"That song," said Linia. "The one you're humming. Where did you hear it?"

An intoxicated smile played at the edges of the girl's lips. "You know where."

"In the temple?" Linia pressed. "Or in your dreams?"

"She comes to me in my dreams." The girl pressed her palm between her collarbones, sighing happily. Linia wasn't sure why it gave her a small stab of jealousy, that gesture. How many people had been bewitched by the beast in this way? How many had kissed her in their dreams, or done even more than that, when in the heat of the dream the beast's gaze had seemed to burn just for her?

She swallowed and refocused. There was important business here. "Do you see the temple in your dreams? Do you know anything about what the people who built the temple believed? About what rites are conducted? About why the beast is there?"

The girl started to giggle. "They're not like the Four Gods' rites. They're... savage. Of the body." She blushed deeply, and Linia knew she wasn't getting any more specifics, not with the girl's mother standing right there. "They're meant to free her and to protect the site from further intruders, but I... I couldn't complete them. I'm not strong enough. Someone like you, maybe..." She cast an oddly hungry eye over Linia's muscled frame, then nodded to herself. "Someone like you."

Linia drew back, disturbed. A last question bubbled up through her, almost without conscious volition. "Are you hers?"

And the girl's wide, mad grin was all the answer Linia needed.

*

There was nothing for it, then, but to trudge back through the forest to the creeper-covered stones of the temple and to try again.

Linia crawled through the same small side opening as before, the stone rough against her knees. She was determined. She would not freeze in her tracks this time; she would not let the song sway her. She would make her way all the way into the temple and she would get the job done. She would confront the beast; she would figure out what this was really about. She would figure out _why-_

It did not occur to her that her original mission had been simply to _kill_ the beast, or to question why it was no longer the goal uppermost in her mind. That had slipped away somehow.

Somewhere deep inside the temple, she saw that flash of green again. She heard that same voice, lilting and irresistible, filling the air around her.

Linia grit her teeth and kept going.

She pressed forward in a haze, no longer fully noticing the way the stone scraped her calloused hands and knees, or the way her sword bumped uncomfortably on the passage's ceiling. She could see the wider space of the temple in front of her, closer, closer, but she was still surprised when she emerged into it, free and blinking.

It was not as dim in here as it ought to have been. Runes and crystals in the ceiling gave the whole chamber a faint glow. It was a round room, covered in writing that Linia could not read and carved with images she couldn't decipher. There was treasure here and there - golden goblets and sacrificial tools, wall hangings that might well be priceless - but even Linia's practiced, greedy eye could not keep focused on the treasures.

Not when the beast herself sat coiled and shifting in the center of the room. Linia could see her fully now, not with the eyes of a dream but waking and firm and undeniable. She looked exactly as she had in the dream: a beautiful woman's face with long tumbling hair, a graceful pair of arms and a shapely torso. Green scales covered the tantalizing curve of her breasts and spread down, to a waist and a long, snakelike tail. The tail was by far the largest part of her; it would be longer than the length of that village girl's house, if she had uncoiled and extended it straight. She was beautiful, but there was something about her presence that transcended beauty. It was as if the whole room reverberated with her voice and her power.

Linia did not dare speak. The beast was still singing to herself, even as she looked Linia up and down. Not with a hungry gaze like that other girl's, not with the smouldering fascination of Linia's dream, but a careful, appraising look.

"Why are you here?" she asked at last, ending the song.

"I-" Linia stammered. "I was sent-" She felt foolish and small. Like when she stood before Lady Amelia trying to account for her own uncouth edges and failures, but even more.

"By Lady Amelia? Or by your dreams?"

Linia opened and shut her mouth, suddenly unsure.

The beast slithered closer. Linia stood frozen to the spot, a small trembling mammal in the serpent's path. When the beast spoke again she was standing directly over Linia, like a noblewoman barking orders or a challenger in battle. But her voice was soft. "You were sent to take a thing that wasn't yours, and to hurt a thing that had not harmed you. But that is no longer what you truly desire. Is it?"

"I..." said Linia. Her voice shook.

The beast touched Linia's cheek and directed her gaze up into her eyes. Linia wanted to lean in, to kiss her as she'd almost kissed her in her dream, but that was foolish and terrible and she didn't dare. "You could desire something else. You could help me. If you are brave enough."

"I am brave!" Linia insisted. Her voice did not shake for this. This was what she'd been proving over and over since she was small, what she _had_ to prove in order to do the work she did.

"But you lean on your armor. Your sword. When what you truly want, deep down, involves neither of these." The beast cast an appraising glance down over her. Linia flushed slightly and stood up straighter. She wanted the beast to like the look of her. She did not want to analyze why she wanted this. "If you want to help me, come back tomorrow, unarmed. You will know what to do. But for now..."

She sang a single, high note, the word more implied than said.

_Flee._

And Linia was back out in the forest, running back to town at top speed, before she even knew what was happening.

*

Linia was the kind of woman who ran around in the woods looking for monsters to slay. She wasn't a book learner. But she knew enough to work out what was happening here.

Church with its Four Gods had never felt right to Linia. Strict and scratchy and confining, like everything else in her old life. The temple and its beast did not feel like that. They felt wild, old, like the woods. Like her.

But that did not make them hers.

Linia did not know the rites of this temple and whatever old faith it had contained. She did not know what powers were worshipped there. All that had been stamped out long ago, when proper civilization had moved to this area and set down its rules. If Linia had grown up amidst it, she might not have liked it the way she did now. She might have failed at that kind of living, too, and run off to the woods just the same. She had no reason to think that her own ancestors, or any other hidden part of herself, had belonged here. She had no right to what was inside.

But she knew that the beast called to her.

She knew that the beast was beautiful. She wanted the beast with her whole body. And she knew something about what it felt like to be pushed out, to live at the edges of a civilization that wanted things done a particular way, and in which she did not fit, and that did not want her. So the beast had stolen livestock - of course she had; what else were beasts supposed to eat? So she had driven village girls mad - only by doing to them the same thing she was doing to Linia. Calling to them. Needing them.

Linia wanted to answer the call.

She knew what she wanted to do.

*

She dreamed of the beast again that night. She dreamed of a ritual.

"Like this," the beast said, guiding her hands. The beast was pressed up against her, scaled breasts soft against Linia's clothed back, hands guiding Linia's hands. She was so warm - weren't scaled things supposed to be cold? Linia could scarcely think.

There was a shape drawn out on the floor, complicated and jagged, with candles and incense at each of its corners. The beast helped her to light the candles, to say the right words - to _sing_ the right words. There was a tune to this rite. It was the same tune the beast had been singing all along.

"What will it do?" Linia asked, as the beast idly caressed her arms, guiding them along.

"It will keep me safe," said the beast. "It will restore this place to some semblance of its former glory. It will keep me sustained without having to trouble your villagers further. And it will keep people out - people like you, who are sent to hurt me." She nuzzled the back of Linia's neck and Linia bit her lip with the pleasure of it; in dreams, she was shameless, caught up in the sensations of the moment. "It will keep you out, too. Physically. But I will still be with you. You already know that, don't you?"

"Yes," Linia murmured, half-closing her eyes.

The beast nudged her arms around, tolerantly amused. "Finish the rite."

Linia sang the syllables she'd been taught, moved the candles along the lines as she'd been shown. The song built and built like pleasure, straining towards some conclusion. Linia could feel it deep inside, the need for that last chord, for completion. She wanted that so much, she could scarcely think of anything else.

But before it could happen, she woke, panting slightly, in the darkness of her room.

*

It was a long, restless night, and she had the dream over and over, practicing the rite again and again, until she could do it without the beast's hands on hers, from memory. But this did not mean that the beast had stopped touching her. Whenever she got the movements and the tune right, she felt that long scaled body move against her, possessive, pleased. The beast's hands in her hair, fingertips trailing down her back. The beast's breath in her ear.

"Do you have a name?" Linia asked. They were so closely entwined. It seemed obscene to keep calling this being _the beast_ in Linia's head, like she wasn't really a person, like she didn't need to be called anything beyond the category in which she'd been placed.

"My name is not for you," said the beast, stroking Linia's scalp.

Linia understood. Some beings could be controlled through the use of their names. Summoned, held to agreements, even ordered to do the wielder's bidding. Linia had never had much luck with that kind of magic, but she'd worked with people who did.

"Can I kiss you?" she asked.

It was a rude question, but Linia was always rude, and the beast's interest in her was clear. She'd been touching Linia, pressing up against her, all night. Linia had begun to want to writhe against those shifting scales, to wrap her arms around the beast as the beast encircled her, to put her mouth against that warm, dry, so-human skin. The ways that the beast moved against her made a familiar liquid warmth grow, deep in her body. She didn't know if the beast's interests went as far as hers did, or if she was only enticing her as a tool to be used; she didn't even know how exactly it would work, with that snakelike body and hers. But she wanted all of it, in the shameless way of dreams.

And every time the beast had tilted Linia's face up to meet hers, any time Linia had dared to move in to press her lips to any part of her, the dream had dissolved and she'd woken up.

This time, the beast smiled, satisfied. Her teeth, Linia noticed, were pointed like a snake's.

"Tomorrow," she said.

And then Lina woke on her bed of straw, sweat beading her forehead, slickness between her legs, and morning was beginning to dawn.

*

Linia didn't put her armor on. She didn't fasten her sword to her back. She didn't bother to inform Lady Amelia that she was headed to the temple again. She was no longer going for Lady Amelia's reasons. And when she was done, she suspected, she'd need to beat a trail out of here quick before word of her failure spread. Linia had never failed at a mission before, and the nobles would call this a failure, even though it wasn't. Failure was when you tried to do a thing and couldn't.

Linia knew exactly what she was trying to do.

She packed her meager belongings and left them in a neat stack at the edge of her room, so that she'd be able to pick them up and leave quickly when needed. And then - unarmed, unarmored, carrying nothing, clad in only the simplest travel garb - she made her way through the woods to the temple.

It looked the same as before, the ancient stones rising up, covered in vines. The mode of entry was the same, and this time the song seemed to pull her forward, not back.

The big room in the middle of the temple opened up for her. The beast was waiting.

The ritual shape on the ground was laid out precisely as she remembered from her dreams. Was this real? Was she still dreaming? The song made it hard to tell, hard to care.

"Are you ready?" said the beast, opening her arms.

"Yes," said Linia.

She stepped forward.

It was just like in her dreams, but more vivid, more real. In a dream she couldn't feel every fiber of her simple garments pressing against her body as the beast's arms encircled her. In a dream she couldn't smell the beast's breath as the beast leaned in, or hear the minute sounds of her scaled tail shifting against the ground.

"Sing with me," said the beast.

She had thought that the beast only guided her hands in the dreams in order to show her how it was done. That she'd have to do the real, waking ritual alone. But the beast's wordless tune was stamped indelibly in her memory. As she opened her mouth to sing it, the beast joined in, a lower harmony that twined around her song and through. And the beast held on to her, stroking her hair, curling against her, as she lit the candles in just the right order, in just the right shape.

Finally she sat in the middle of the shape, everything set up just right, the song building to its inevitable conclusion, and she was finished. Everything was set up the way she had been taught. The dreams never lasted long enough to show her the next step.

She was only faintly surprised when the beast leaned in against her, pulling her close.

"Do you still want to kiss me?" said the beast.

"Yes," said Linia, and she pressed forward and closed the distance between them.

It was not a dream. There was no rude awakening that could interrupt this now. The beast's mouth was warm and soft, and her lips parted for Linia's, a sigh of pleasure echoing somewhere in the air.

The next second, the whole ritual shape on the ground flared to life.

A bright green glow danced along the lines that had been drawn between the candles. There was a charge in the air, making the tiny hairs on Linia's limbs stand up, making her skin even more aware of the warmth of the beast's touch and the minute movements of the air around it. It was not unpleasant. A shiver seemed to pass through her from the ground itself, up her body, into the beast's waiting lips; and the beast kissed back harder, closing her eyes.

"What's happening?" Linia whispered, when she came up for air.

"You know," said the beast.

And she did. And she wanted it.

"Lie down," said the beast, coaxing her backwards. She let the beast do it with her almost human-hands, and she let the beast close the gap between their lips again. They moved like that, writhing over each other, delirious with the magic charge that seemed to flow through Linia's veins. She was not afraid. She was only overwhelmed in a way that made her want _more._

The beast helped her out of her simple clothes, leaving them strewn on the floor between the ritual lines. Her slitted eyes had darkened with interest, and her warm scaled skin pressed to Linia's skin.

"You're strong enough," the beast whispered, and even her whisper was somehow musical and electrifying. "You know what you need to do."

"Yes," Linia panted.

"Put your hand between your legs."

Linia obeyed. She trailed her fingertips along herself. She was so wet. She wanted this pleasure so badly, wanted to writhe and shudder and come apart in the beast's arms.

"Slowly," said the beast. "Just slowly. Ssh."

The beast rested her forehead against Linia's as she worked, slower than she wanted to, trailing little circles over her inner lips and the nub of her clit. The beast watched raptly, her lips parting in pleasure at the things Linia did to herself.

"Like that," she encouraged. "Just like that. Show me what your body is doing for me."

Linia spread her legs a little wider, giving her a better view, and the beast smiled.

"Put your fingers inside you," she whispered.

Linia obeyed. A finger slid inside easily, two fingers with a bit of effort. The beast hummed in approval as Linia started to alternate between that and the outside of her, instinctively moving her hand faster now, grinding her clit against the pads of her fingertips.

The beast was still touching her, a hand twined in her hair, but the other hand had withdrawn. Buried in the coils of that long tail somewhere. The beast's gaze was fixed and focused on Linia, but from the way her eyelids lowered halfway, from the way her own lips parted and the way she bit her lower lip with those pointed teeth, Linia could guess what she was doing. She wanted to know just what was hidden in there, if there was something like the cunt of a human woman or something snakelike and unimaginable. In that moment, hazed with pleasure, Linia was sure she would have embraced whatever it was, put her fingers and lips to it easily, if the beast had asked. But the beast had not asked, and Linia suspected that this, like the beast's true name, was not for her.

Her breath was coming out of her in gasps and little moans. She could finish this with just her hand, given time, but she wanted more. Linia liked to grind and writhe against her lovers, to be in control of the motion that way.

"Please," she gasped out. "Can I-?"

The beast gave her a langorous, teasing kiss. "Can you what?"

She pressed her legs even further apart, trying to make room for the width of the beast's body. "Can I feel you against me?"

The beast smiled indulgently, and her coils shifted, as a part of the scaled curve of her settled in between Linia's legs, against her hips, as wide as the hips of a human woman. It wasn't the same part of her where her hand had gone - just a length of snakelike belly, or maybe tail - but it was enough. Linia gasped at it, the feel of those warm smooth scales against the most sensitive parts of her.

"Like that?" the beast asked.

"Yes," said Linia, her voice growing higher-pitched, needy. She moved her hips, rutting against the beast's form, letting her clit slide against those scales, faster and faster. She clung to those scales and kissed them, until there was nothing in her world but reptilian green. "Like that. _Yes-_ "

Her orgasm crept up and surprised her, even sooner than she'd thought, and she shrieked. The whole room appeared to respond to her. All the lights, the candles and runes, the mystic lights that glowed along the edges of that ritual shape, all of them flared into a blinding brightness. She felt for a moment that she was coming apart entirely, painless but alarming, every part of her body and mind flung out in a different direction, and then-

*

She was outside the temple again. She did not remember how she had gotten here. Her clothes had been hastily put back on, and her inner thighs were sticky with the aftereffects of pleasure. The beast must have ordered her out, the same way she'd made her flee the other two times.

But the temple had completely transformed.

It was no longer a crumbling structure, ancient and overgrown with vines. It was whole and clean and alive. As imposing as the church and the noble buildings in the village. And around it shimmered a faint light like the one from the ritual. Linia knew that, if she tried to go in again past that barrier of light, she'd be rebuffed.

And so would anyone else Lady Amelia tried to send in to slay this beast.

It felt right. It felt like a loss, being cut off so abruptly from that intoxicating voice and the touch of the beast's hands, but it felt right.

Linia turned and walked away through the forest, back to the inn.

*

She retrieved her sword and armor and shouldered her pack efficiently, tossing a little more than the required payment to the innkeeper. By the time Lady Amelia worked out what had happened, Linia wanted to be far away from here.

She would have other employers, other jobs. Some of them would hear about the failure at this job, but they'd listen to whatever explanation Linia came up with. Many of them wouldn't know about it at all. She'd be okay.

Or maybe, just maybe, she wouldn't need those other employers at all.

That night, in Linia's dreams, she did not see the beast. Not directly. But she caught a flash in the corner of her eye of something like those green scales, and she heard that voice again, that tune, twining faintly through the air.

"There are others like me," said the beast. "There are other places like this. You are strong enough. Will you help us?"

And Linia smiled, bold and carefree, pleased just to hear that sound again.

"Yes."


End file.
